Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By : Chris Halverson
Book Image

PowerCLI Essentials

By: Chris Halverson

Overview of this book

Have you ever wished you could automatically get a report with all the relevant information about your VMware environments in exactly the format you want? Or that you could automate a crucial task that needs to be performed on a regular basis? Powerful Command Line Interface (PowerCLI) scripts do all these things and much more for VMware environments. PowerCLI is a command-line interface tool used to automate VMware vSphere environments. It is used to handle complicated administration tasks through use of various cmdlets and scripts, which are designed to handle certain aspects of VSphere servers and to help you manage them. This book will show you the intricacies of PowerCLI through real-life examples so that you can discover the art of PowerCLI scripting. At the start, you will be taught to download and install PowerCLI and will learn about the different versions of it. Moving further, you will be introduced to the GUI of PowerCLI and will find out how to develop single line scripts to duplicate running tasks, produce simple reports, and simplify administration. Next, you will learn about the methods available to get information remotely. Towards the end, you will be taught to set up orchestrator and build workflows in PowerShell with update manager and SRM scripts.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
PowerCLI Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Where do we find scripts and snippets that are safe to run?


There are, literally, hundreds of sites, blogs, and developer sites that contain PoSH code and PowerCLI optimized scripts. This book is not going to list every single place to start; however, it is going to list key ways to validate the code and some places to start.

VMware communities

The VMware communities are a great place to start. Where not all code is good, there are key individuals that stand out as contributors of merit. LucD, Alan Renouf, RvdNieuwendijk, and others have built an impressive list of appropriate scripts for various tasks. Typical searches in a favorite search engine, <Script purpose> (site: https://communities.vmware.com), should find any number of examples of scripts to supply syntax and methods to run.

VMware blogs

Heading to https://blogs.vmware.com/powercli will lead you to many interesting articles about PowerCLI and different ways to program interesting areas of the utility. All the articles are written...